Using Social Media Data to Know your Book Audience
May Meeting Notes + June Invite
Hello authors!
Here is the invite for the June Meeting:
ANBIP June Meeting
Tuesday, June 25 · 5 PST, 6 MST, 7 Central, 8 EST
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/cas-ioae-tvx
Notes from the May 2024 Meeting:
Resources:
Lynne forwarded me this “Sell More Books Crash Course,” which has passed but you can sign up to get notified when the next one is! I haven’t used it so I can’t say if it’s good, but it was free and might be again.
The website is Author Success and you can look through that and get a free PDF called “Six-Figure Mistakes Most Authors Make (and how to avoid them).” I read through it and I’m thinking I’m kind of interested in the idea of a “program” that some authors sell, like a bone-hunting and bone-cleaning course. Other stuff seems a little basic (“don’t forget to build an audience,” “don’t focus too much on yourself,” etc.) But maybe we all need reminders here and there.
That said, I’m always skeptical. They mention they helped sell many copies of Rich Dad, Poor Dad which did make a lot of money, but as I understand it the author is…kind of controversial?OK, everyone’s talking about AI, we should talk about AI Someone suggested Coda and SciSummary for getting summaries of scientific papers. I’ve also heard good things about Perplexity, which is like ChatGPT but they cite their sources.
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Thoughts:
Finding your audience:
Why do people follow you?
When you pitch a book, you’re generally supposed to talk about who your audience is. I find there are two terrible ways to do this: speculate or look at the data on your social media accounts (if they’re relevant to your book.)
Speculating = just assuming who would be into it with no data.
My assumptions when I was pitching my book: veterinarians, paleontologists, farmers, animal-lovers, hunters, morbid people, goths, punks. Possibly just anyone who eats meat and has ever thought about it? Everyone in the world is affected by dead animals…but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to read this.
Social media data = demographics that I don’t find very useful.
For instance, my TikTok analytics say that 69% of my audience is women. Ok…so? 57% of TikTok users are women and what do I do with this information? Do I target women more or less? How does one target women? Apparently ladies love bones. Looks like I was already targeting them. It’s just circular logic. My audience is my audience and I really doubt they follow because their gender is compelling them to do it.
It’s like those “gift guides for men.” If the only thing you know about him is that he’s a man, either you don’t know him or he’s really boring; that gift will not be thoughtful. So…I’m not really sold on that sort of demographic data, personally. Happy to hear if I’m missing something.
Anyway, who is my audience? No, I don’t care to know everything about them, or random irrelevant facts…a better question is, why do people follow my accounts? What specific part of their heart or brain connects with my content? I want to find that little piece of meat and appeal to it in every other person who has the same inside them.
So…I asked my followers! (I was asking for a potential future photo book, rather than my upcoming book Carcass: On the Afterlives of Animal Bodies, but it’s similar in theme.)
I asked on TikTok, FB, and Instagram, and I directed Tumblr to answer on Instagram, then I put everything into a spreadsheet and categorized them.
Here is the data from 118 answers!
I categorized each comment with up to three tags. Here are the things that people mentioned, and how many:
19 Emotion: Comments are like “This makes me feel more at peace with death.”
42 Hobby/Career: “My hobby, interest, or career was already death/bones before I started following.”
47 Beauty/artist: “Death is beautiful, or I find these pictures inspiring for my art.”
18 Education: “I’m learning things.”
39 Interesting: “It’s weird/interesting/fascinating.”
4 Personal Connection: “I’ve followed you on other platforms/I know you.”
Let’s visualize:
What does this mean? I’d argue that 1) a photo book may be the right next direction to take my dead-animal content as so many people are interested in them visually, and 2) there is already a community of people out there who care about this stuff.
Have you identified and connected with the people out there who already care about your topic?
I encourage finding what already exists out there online, but there are some benefits to building your own brand. For instance, if someone hates something about you or your work and was never going to buy your book anyway, then they wouldn’t be following you, and you don’t have to waste your time appealing to them. If you join a community that already exists, that’s less work, but it’s also going to be less specific to you. Maybe do both.
(Data disclaimer: I’m sure my results are imperfect because there is always some selection bias in the data. Book-buyers aren’t synonymous with the population of people who use these social platforms, saw my post asking why they follow, and decided to spend their time typing out a comment. And maybe there are some reasons that people don’t want to say. I might have missed a few comments, and I kind of just categorized them based on my own interpretation. Another option is to add a poll so people can just click on something, which would get more responders because it’s easier, but it would have to start with me assuming I know the reasons and functionally leading the questions.)
See you later this month!
Note:
These notes are getting too long so I’m going to send another later about another thing we talked about: putting memoir-y elements in a non-memoir!